Wafer defect inspection is a common practice in the semiconductor manufacturing industry as a part of complicated yield analysis and control process. Although every automatic defect detection tool vendor utilizes different inspection principles and methods, all have one concept in common—the inspection recipe (also referred to as an inspection job). The mentioned inspection recipe is created with respect to some kind of representing wafer and is used for every wafer of the same origin (product, process etc.). All wafer inspection tools share the same “setup”→“run” scenario.
Most of the automatic inspection tools face the very same challenges of being invariant to process variation. That means that the same inspection recipe created using one representing wafer is being successfully used for the entire batch of wafers of the same kind.